Did I Miss Anything?

The poem is written in blank verse in a straightforward, idiomatic style of speech. Its eight stanzas are of unequal lengths with the last two stanzas consisting of single lines. The length of the poetic line itself varies, such as seen in this comparison between Lines 9 and 10: “Nothing. None of the content of this course/has value or meaning.” Further, unlike poetic convention, new lines do not necessarily begin with an uppercase letter, nor do lines end with full stops. The use of punctuation is minimal and arbitrary. The poem also uses the literary devices of run-on sentences and enjambment, with thoughts spilling onto successive lines. A great example of enjambment is the five lines in Stanza 2, which are basically one sentence broken up into five parts:

“Everything. I gave an exam worth

40 per cent of the grade for this term

and assigned some reading due today

on which I'm about to hand out a quiz

worth 50 per cent (Lines 4-8)”

Cumulatively, these choices give the poem the quality of a fluid, in-the-moment internal dialogue. The speaker’s thoughts pour out of them in a rush and cannot be contained by the structure of formal verse. Further, the visual look of the poem on the page mirrors the speaker’s mental state. Each stanza in indented with respect to its predecessor, capturing the zigzag motion of the speaker’s answers. The poem’s visual architecture shows that the teacher is veering between polarities themselves as they between the possible responses and the emotions that accompany them. It is also a code for their inner turmoil: though the teacher’s language is not overtly hostile, it is powered by a seething, barely repressed anger. The anger of the teacher is a noteworthy and unusual motif, because in popular literature and culture students often view teachers as staid or stoic beings with a boring or absent inner life. Wayman creates a distinct dramatic persona in the teacher. The teacher’s dramatic proclamations are addressed specifically to a “you” – the students, who are a stand-in for the reader. Structuring the poem as an intimate address draws the reader in, helping them identify better with the speaker.

The mismatch between the teacher’s reality – the hard work they put in preparing every lesson and making every lesson interesting – and the perception of the students – the lesson is expendable and can be reduced to the banality of the titular question – contributes to the teacher feeling devalued. The poet illustrates this mismatch by juxtaposing vague terms like “nothing,” “everything,” and “anything” with concrete details such as “I gave an exam worth/40 per cent of the grade for this term” (Lines 4-5). The reference to numbers is also the teacher’s sly criticism of the way most students assess classes: as a number of hours the student has to somehow pass or a percentage or grade they have to achieve.

In Stanza 3, the teacher’s note of irony forms a thin veil over their despair. According to the teacher, the students can take off as many days as they like since:

“any activities we undertake as a class

I assure you will not matter either to you or me

and are without purpose(Lines 12-14)”.

The speaker’s bleak tone signifies the sense of futility in reaching their students. Though the teacher wants learning to matter to the students, it seems pointless in the face of such questions as “did I miss anything.” Here, the teacher’s resignation can also be interpreted as their fear of being irrelevant. The students, despite their lack of care, represent the future, while the teacher feels stuck in the past. The teacher has to make peace with the fact that they cannot completely ensure a successful future for the students despite their best efforts; it will ultimately be up to life and to the students themselves to achieve success in their education and their own lives. The poem’s expressive minimalism manages to evoke all of these buried feelings in its sparely told lines.

One of the reasons the poem is so evocative is because of its universal themes. Most people reading the poem have been at least in the shoes of the students, and many have been in the shoes of a teacher, mentor, or parent. Thus, the reader can immediately associate with the poem’s underlying and unstated concerns. To retain the universal, symbolic value of categories such as “student,” “teacher,” and “classroom,” Wayman deliberately avoids cluttering the poem with sensorial details. Like the teacher and students, the classroom could be any classroom in the world. The identity of the teacher also remains unspecified and, as with many poems, the voice of the speaker cannot necessarily be conflated with Wayman himself as the poet. In his notes on the poem, Wayman underscores this point by refusing to identify the teacher with any particular gender.

In the middle of the poem – Stanza 4 of 8, and the poem’s longest stanza – the speaker uses a hyperbole or exaggeration to illustrate the peak of his anger with the students. In this hyperbole, an angel descends to the classroom to impart divine wisdom to the students. The idea of the angel as a carrier of God’s divine messages and prophecies is an idea common in Jewish and Christian mythologies. In describing the descent of the angel, the poet evokes the idea that learning and religion are intertwined, with sages, monks, and clerics being among the earliest scholars in the world. However, the other sense in which the poet uses the angel is more tongue-in-cheek: the angel is an allegory for instant, all-encompassing knowledge which can be downloaded effortlessly. This is the kind of effortless knowledge to which many students aspire and which, of course, does not exist. Even the religious scholars of the ancient world did not truly receive instant revelations; their wisdom often resulted from decades of study and devotion. Through the allegory of the angel, the speaker is also gently pokes fun at their own anger. Since the class did not impart all-encompassing knowledge, should the teacher really be so angry at the absence of the students?

The reference to the angel is also a device to taunt the absentee students, as Stanza 5 makes obvious. How could anything that significant occur while the students, bloated on the self-importance of youth – were away? Of course, the speaker’s mocking question implies that the students do possibly miss out on significant lessons during their absence from class.

From Stanzas 6 onwards, the speaker’s tone sheds some of its irony, indicating the poem is approaching the kernel of its wisdom. The speaker is no longer irate or passive-aggressive but resigned and circumspect. What the students have missed is not as grand as angelic wisdom but something more immediate and earthlier. They missed that particular class: a “microcosm” of human experience where teachers and students exchanged ideas and experienced various emotions. Significantly, the teacher paints a vital, rich image of the classroom – one of the more concrete descriptions in the poem – to invite the idea that the living classroom itself is more alive than angels and abstractions.

The use of the word “opportunity” (Line 29) suggests that the experience is precious and each moment must be seized. Though the students will presumably have other opportunities to learn, the teacher emphasizes that the missed class “was one place/and you weren’t there” (Lines 27-28). The lesson of the poem is that even the teacher cannot quantify what the students missed; it is inestimable. What they lost out on most is presence. The speaker implies that if the students continue to stay in a state of disengagement from life, they will stagnate.